Presently, the liquid crystal display has been used widely for personal computers, portable electronic appliances, and the like. The liquid crystal display generally comprises, as shown in FIG. 1, a transparent electrode 3, an alignment layer 9, a RGB coloration film 4, and a black matrix 5 between two transparent substrates 1; polarizers 2 installed in the outer sides of the two transparent substrates 1; a sealing material 10 disposed in the circumference of the two transparent substrates 1; and a liquid crystal 7 encapsulated in a gap between the two transparent substrates 1 located on opposite sides of the sealing material 10. In this liquid crystal display, spacers 8 are used for the purpose of regulating the gap between the two transparent substrates 1 and retaining a proper thickness (cell gap) of a liquid crystal layer.
In a conventional method of fabricating the liquid crystal display, since the spacers are randomly and evenly ejected to a substrate bearing pixel electrodes thereon, the spacers are sometimes disposed even on the pixel electrodes, which are display parts. The spacers are generally made of a synthetic resin, glass or the like and if the spaces are located on the pixel electrodes, due to the depolarization function, light leakage takes place in the parts where the spacers are located. Further, light omission occurs owing to disorder of the alignment of the liquid crystal on the spacer surface to deteriorate the contrast and the color tone and worsen the display image quality. Further, with respect to a TFT liquid crystal display, when the spacers are disposed on TFT elements, there occurs a serious problem that the elements are broken when pressure is applied to the substrate.
To solve such a problem caused in the case of random spray of the spacers, it is proposed that the spacers are located only in light shielding regions, non-display parts. As a method of locating the spacers only on specified positions, for example, Japanese Kokai Publication Hei-4-198919 discloses a method of locating the spacers only on the positions corresponding to the aperture parts after aperture parts of a mask and the positions to locate the spaces thereon are conformed to each other, using a mask having aperture parts, and Japanese Kokai Publication Hei-6-258647 discloses a method of electrostatically attracting the spacers to a photoconductor and then transferring the spacers to a transparent substrate. However, in these methods, since the mask or a photoconductor was directly brought into contact with the substrate, there occurred a problem that the alignment layer on a substrate were damaged and deterioration of the image quality of the liquid crystal display was caused.
On the other hand, Japanese Kokai Publication Hei-10-339878 discloses a method of locating resin spacers on specified positions due to electrostatic repulsion by applying electric potential to pixel electrodes on a substrate and ejecting the charged resin spacers. However, in this method, since electrodes in the pattern of desired location were required, it was impossible to locate the spacers on completely optional positions and it was sometimes impossible to employ the method for fabrication of specified liquid crystal displays.
Japanese Kokai Publication Sho-57-58124 discloses a method of locating spacers on a substrate by an ink-jet method of ejecting droplets of spacer dispersion liquid from nozzles of an ink-jet apparatus to the substrate and depositing them on the substrate. It may be said that this method is advantageous in a point that the spacers in an optional pattern can be located on optional positions, without bringing the mask or the like into contact with the substrate like the methods.
However, in a conventional ink-jet method, if the interval of deposition of the droplets of the spacer dispersion liquid was narrowed so as to improve the resolution (narrow the arrangement intervals of the spacers) of the liquid crystal display, the droplets of the spacer dispersion liquid were touched together on the substrate, and on the other hand, if the quantity of each droplet of the spacer dispersion liquid was decreased by making the hole diameter of the nozzles of an ink-jet head small so as to prevent being touched together of the droplets of the spacer dispersion liquid on the substrate, the precision of the deposition positions of the droplets of the spacer dispersion liquid was lowered and the resolution of the liquid crystal display could not be improved.